The 64th Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics (DPP) was held October 17–21, 2022 in Spokane, Washington at the Spokane Convention Center. More than 1800 physicists attended, safely, in-person. With both virtual and on-site participants, discussions were lively, and the research presentations shared the most exciting developments in the modern observation, theory, simulation, and manipulation of plasma. The presentations included four invited review talks, 98 invited talks, four tutorials, and four presentations from this year's prize and award recipients. There were 1149 contributed poster presentations and 945 contributed oral presentations. Including both in-person and remote attendees, DPP 2022 had a record 2232 participants. In keeping with APS guidance for hybrid meetings, in-person presentations of all invited presentations were broadcast live and were accompanied by a Q&A discussion. All contributed oral presentations were live-streamed and poster presentations were prerecorded along with options to schedule in-person discussions on demand. Six mini-conferences were held: “Heating and Non-Thermal Particle Acceleration during Magnetic Reconnection in Laboratory,” “Public-Private Partnerships for Fusion Energy,” “Workforce Development Through Research-Based, Plasma-Focused Science Education and Public Engagement,” “Charged Particle Transport in High-Energy-Density Plasma,” “The Integrated Tokamak Exhaust and Performance Gap,” and “Relativistic Plasma Physics in Supercritical Fields.” Building on the success of last year's “Student Day,” Sunday afternoon's session “for students, by students” included lightning talks, plasma trivia, and an informal occasion to connect with other students, learn how to get the most from the DPP Annual Meeting, and share successful ways to connect with colleagues and advance their professional careers.
Review talks spanned the range of plasma physics and highlighted milestone achievements. On Monday, Jong-Kyu Park (Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory) opened the meeting with a review presentation titled “Benefits of non-asymmetry in tokamaks.” While small breaking of magnetic asymmetry can be undesirable, careful design of non-axisymmetric magnetic perturbations, guided by predictive computational tools, can improve tokamak performance by properly modifying plasma profiles. On Tuesday, Laurent Divol (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) presented a review titled “Dynamics and variability in near unity gain inertial confinement fusion implosions on the National Ignition Facility.” Divol presented the measurements and physics behind the record yield of fusion energy and reviewed the main sources of fusion gain degradation, namely, mix induced by target imperfections and low-mode hot-spot asymmetry and provided a framework to assess further ICF optimizations. Tunde Fulop (Chalmers University of Technology) delivered a presentation titled “Runaway electrons in fusion plasmas,” where she covered recent developments in the modeling of runaways in plasmas, bringing together insight into the tokamak runaway problem gained over decades, and showed examples of modeling runaway dynamics in present-day devices, including how synthetic diagnostics can be used for benchmarking theoretical models and probing runaway dynamics. On Thursday, Amitava Bhattacharjee (Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, Princeton University) presented his James Clerk Maxwell Prize address titled “Current sheets and the plasmoid instability: Mediators of fast magnetic reconnection and turbulence.” Bhattacharjee reviewed our understanding in systems having closed magnetic field lines and those without, such as in stellar coronae and compact astrophysical objects. He spoke on turbulence created from thin current sheets, the onset of the plasmoid instability, and new power laws for the structures that play a role in particle acceleration and discussed how exascale computers, exploited by state-of-the-art codes, hold the promise of breaking new ground in making predictions in plasma regimes previously inaccessible. On Friday, the review presentations concluded with Forrest W. Doss's (Los Alamos National Laboratory) review of “Turbulence in high-energy-density plasma.” Building on the efforts of a four-year campaign using LLNL's National Ignition Facility that successfully measured the deeply nonlinear regimes of high-energy-density (HED) plasmas, Doss explained that HED turbulence can develop analogously to classical fluids, even in timescales as short as tens of nanoseconds.
The tutorials also covered the field of plasma physics and introduced some new topics and technologies to plasma physicists that connect to our research. Monday's tutorial, by Cristina Rea (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), discussed “Interpretable machine learning accelerating fusion research” and offered a general description of artificial intelligence and then focused attention on machine learning and deep learning paradigms that enable effective controllers for magnetically confined fusion plasmas. Rea provided the audience with several examples of data-driven fusion applications conducted at the DIII-D facility. On Tuesday, Jean-Pierre Boeuf (Paul Sabatier University) introduced the audience to “Physics and instabilities of low temperature E × B plasmas for spacecraft propulsion and other applications.” Felicie Albert (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) delivered Wednesday's tutorial, “Principles and applications of x-ray sources based on laser-plasma acceleration,” where she reviewed the prospects of using plasmas produced by intense lasers as particle accelerators and x-ray light sources, as well as some of the applications they enable. Thursday's final tutorial was presented by Ammar Hakim (Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory) titled “Modern computational methods for fluid and kinetic simulations of plasmas at (almost) all scales,” when he explained how to make the correct numerical scheme to allow simulations of a wide variety of problems in laboratory and space plasma physics.
In addition to scholarly research presentations, the meeting had opportunities to enhance the lives of our community. The meeting's first day ended with the Women in Plasma Physics Reception and the University Fusion Association General Meeting. Tuesday lunch was occasion for a Town Hall meeting of the Committee for the Concerns of Students and Early Career Scientists, and Tuesday evening was the student appreciation reception. Wednesday lunch was occasion for our second “DPP Pride” luncheon, open to all DPP members with a panel of university, national lab, and student representatives to discuss LGBT+ issues within the plasma physics community.
Awards were presented before the banquet dinner this year and concluded with a slide presentation from all of the Division's Annual Meetings, dating back to the first held in Monterey, California in 1959. The APS Awards included Alison Christopherson (who graduated from University of Rochester under the supervision of Professor Riccardo Betti) for the Marshall N. Rosenbluth Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award and Dr. Jonathan Squire (Research Fellow at the University of Otago, New Zealand) for the Thomas H. Stix Award for Outstanding Early Career Contributions to Plasma Physics. The 2022 recipients of the John Dawson Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics Research were members of the National Ignition Facility's (NIF) Burning Plasma Team for the first laboratory demonstration of a burning deuterium-tritium plasma where alpha heating dominates the plasma energetics. The 2022 Lev D. Landau and Lyman Spitzer Jr. Award for Outstanding Contributions to Plasma Physics, awarded jointly by the Plasma Physics Divisions of both the American Physical Society (APS) and the European Physical Society (EPS), was awarded to Christopher Chen (Queen Mary University London), Gregory Howes (University of Iowa), and Kristopher Klein (University of Arizona) for the theoretical development of the field-particle correlation technique and its application to spacecraft measurements directly showing that electron Landau damping plays a role in the dissipation of space plasma turbulence. This year's recipient for the James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics was Professor Amitava Bhattacharjee (Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, Princeton University) for a wide range of theoretical investigations, including magnetic reconnection, magnetohydrodynamic turbulence, dynamo action, and dusty plasmas and for pioneering contributions to linking laboratory plasmas to space and astrophysical plasmas. The 2022 recipient of the Ronald C. Davidson Award, presented in cooperation with the APS-DPP by AIP Publishing, was Professor Ian Hutchison (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) for his research on electron holes in phase space.
The 2022 APS/DPP Program Committee developed the program for the 2022 meeting. The group was chaired by Karl Krushelnick (Chair Elect), Andrew Ware (Local Co-ordinator), Denise Hinkel (Chair), Ed Thomas (Vice Chair), Oliver Schmitz (Secy/Treasurer), Mike Brown (Past Chair), Richard Dendy (EPS), Baonian Wan (AAPPS-DPP), Christoph Niemann, Saikat Thakur, Nuno Loureiro, Jim Schroeder, Paul Cassak, Chuanfei Dong, Sylvi Haendel, Jorge Rocca, Amina Hussein, Michael Litos, John Booske, Peng Zhang, Tony Gonsalves, Jason Myatt, Annie Kritcher, Max Karasik, Sylvie Depierreux, Javier Honrubia, Cliff Thomas, Brian Albright, Matthias Geissel, Ronnie Shepherd, Phil Nilson, Greg Rochau, Alla Safranova, Alexander “Sasha” Velikovitch, Mark Schmitt, Yevgeny Raitses, Andrei Smolyakov, Elijah Thimsen, Zhehui (Jeph) Wang, Alexandre Likhanskii, Andrea Garofalo, Zach Hartwig, John Sarff, Carlos Paz-Soldan, Rajesh Maingi, Costanza Maggi, Eric Fredrickson, Charles Lasnier, Eleonora Viezzer, Bill Dorland, Phil Snyder, Antoine Cerfon, Luis Chacon, Marina Gorelenkova, Jeff Candy, Dmitri Uzdensky, Weichao Tu, Ben Chandran, Hui Li, Sergey Lebedev, and Arturo Dominguez. The members of this committee did an excellent job of putting together an exciting and well-balanced program.
Many individuals were essential to the success of the meeting, including staff from some of the participating institutions and the APS Meetings Department, Ebony Adams, Alexandria Cannon, Andre Cholewinski, Hunter Clemens, Jim Egan, Donna Greene, Terri Olsen, Ligette Rogers, and Vinaya Sathyasheelappa. Cynthia Smith, Lee Warren, and the Freeman Team provided the audio-visual support. A special thanks to Saralyn Stewart, DPP Administrator. Saralyn assists in every aspect and maintains the corporate memory.
The review and invited speakers as well as the tutorial presenters were invited to submit papers for publication in a special edition of Physics of Plasmas. We thank the editors and staff of Physics of Plasmas, including Michael Mauel, Igor Kaganovich, Jason Myatt, André Melzer, Andrei Smolyakov, Carl Sovinec, Brian Solis, Benita Hammer, and Deborah Doherty, for their efforts in preparing this special issue, which contains over 30 invited papers across the important topical areas of fundamental and applied plasma physics.1
